←back to thread

A software conference that advocates for quality

(bettersoftwareconference.com)
108 points leoncaet | 1 comments | 11 Jul 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | source
Show context
kragen ◴[12 Jul 25 01:54 UTC] No.44538644[source]▶
I may be the only one who thought this, but this doesn't seem to be related to the fondly remembered Better Software Magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Software_Magazine

It seems to be socially associated with the Handmade Hero and Jon Blow Jai crowd, which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame. They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

replies(2): >>44538705 #>>44538753 #
swesour ◴[12 Jul 25 02:18 UTC] No.44538753[source]▶
> which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame

This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

> They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't prize any kind of UX above correctness.

replies(3): >>44538791 #>>44539162 #>>44539830 #
1. tsimionescu ◴[12 Jul 25 06:31 UTC] No.44539830[source]▶
From what I've seen, they are very much in a game developer mindset: you want to make a finished product for a specific use, you want that product to be very well received for your users, and you want it to run really fast on their hardware. When you're done with it, your next product will likely be 80% new code, so long term maintainabity is not a major concern.

And stability is important, but not critical - and the main way they want to achieve it is that errors should be very obvious so that they can be caught easily in manual testing. So C++ style UB is not great, since you may not always catch it, but crashing on reading a null pointer is great, since you'll easily see it during testing. Also, performance concerns trump correctness - paying a performance cost to get some safety (e.g. using array bounds access enforcement) is lazy design, why would you write out of bounds accesses in the first place?